


Subroutine-21

by Phase7



Category: Rockman | Mega Man - All Media Types, Rockman.EXE | Mega Man Battle Network
Genre: Fluffy Ending, Future Fic, M/M, and now it gets trippy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-04
Updated: 2015-05-04
Packaged: 2018-03-28 23:19:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3873643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phase7/pseuds/Phase7
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After his brother dies, Hub's programming floods his digital world with the past and all its sad reminders.  Bass wants to drag Hub away from the humanity that hurts them.  Together, they find a compromise that can paint a happier future.<br/>(This fic posits that navis visualise cyberspace in different ways, so the way Hub and Bass literally see the world around them is different.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Subroutine-21

Hikari Lan received a Buddhist funeral. Select friends and family gathered two days later at a lawyer's office to read his will. During both events, a tall man in a dark grey trench-coat and white gloves held Lan's PET perfectly centre to his chest. On the screen, Lan's brother still cried, because the digital tear voxels painted on his face could not run out, and that made them feel cheaper to him. So he kept sending the command to cry more to make up for it.  
  
Lan was survived by his brother, wife, two children, and one grandchild. They gathered along with the head of his Brawl World Online guild, QChulainn, and long time friend Chaud whose lawyers were handling the departed's estate. When he'd developed his will, the lawyers had most of the say in the monetary partition. Lan had been more vocal about who got his comic collection, roller skates, virtual real estate in Brawl World, and the proper way to distribute his battle chips and old games.  
  
"The money all goes to her. She'll know what to do with it," he'd say, referring to his wife and pointing at her next to him at the table. Mayl worked part time at a bank, after all. She'd always handled the money, and trusted Hikari "MegaMan.EXE" Hub to keep Lan to his stipend instead of spending it all on flashy clothes or foreign food.  
  
"What will happen to me when you're gone?" Hub had asked at the last meeting for the will. While Lan's face was creased by eighty five years of laughs, Hub looked the same as he ever had, 3D-modelled to look like a mirror of his brother, forever twenty-one.  
  
Lan had scratched his white hair. "You have someone to take care of you, right? Mmm, that's right."  
  
"You don't get to say 'mmm, that's right' and seem wise just because you're old..." Hub had grumbled. It was pretty obvious that, as usual, Lan didn't really know what he was talking about. He always expected the people around him to take care of things. They usually did.  
  
"Yae wanted you," Mayl had said, thinking of her grand daughter. "But then, maybe you want to take a vacation after working so many years. You deserve it."  
  
"How could I stop working? Someone will always need MegaMan. Yae will feel very sad and... maybe I could help her. She'll have the safest PET in the world!"  
  
"Just so long as I don't have to hand you over to the institute," Lan had said with true conviction. "He's a person, my brother. You can't say you own him." Lan had pointed forcefully at the screen across the table being held as usual at chest height.  
  
The lawyers had shuffled their papers again. "We're still in talks with the institute..."  
  
That's how it had been. The money was taken care of, the comics passed on to the younger son Patch, the roller skates to older daughter Key because they fit her, the house and the battle chips and "whatever's on my desk, plus the desk" to Mayl, and then the virtual assets had been parcelled. Save for the last two : the PET itself and its occupant. Even those who had not been present at the will's writing were now tensely waiting to see what Lan had decided for his brother who had become his legal property.  
  
The lawyer administering the will advanced the file to its next page. She knew what was written on it, but still found the request troubling, mostly for complex legal reasons that she hoped she would never have to argue in court. Someone else in the firm could do it. She pushed up her glasses nervously.  
  
"My PET goes to Bass.EXE," the lawyer read.  
  
Heads at the table turned. Worried faces sprung up. Mayl coughed, stared right at Hub on his screen, and then shifted the silver knife of her gaze upward. The metal-headed man-thing in a coat finally looked away from the wall.  
  
"Yes. Fine," Bass synthesized through the doll's underused and crackling speakers.  
  
"You accept the device?" the lawyer asked mostly to assure herself that the Bass.EXE in the document was actually present.  
  
"Yes. Hurry up."  
  
Mayl put a hand over her mouth to hide very soft laughter. It felt wrong to laugh at that moment, but something in her had cracked. It was probably the stress of the past week.  
  
"Is he allowed to keep it? He's a program," the guild master asked.  
  
"You couldn't stop me if I walked out of here with it," Bass said. His head swivelled on one axis to face the lawyer. "Tell us about Hub. Hub."  
  
"My brother, Hikari Hub," the lawyer read, "best known as MegaMan.EXE, is to be released as a legally independent entity with personhood. Please be sure to say 'You're free now, bro' next... Well, there we go."  
  
"Legal personhood? What does that mean?" Hub piped up from the PET, the speakers cranked up to maximum volume form his surprise. Bass declined to manually lower them.  
  
"It means that you are once again a human being in the eyes of the law, having the full rights of any human being. I have to warn you that although this is how you are now represented on file at our firm, you may be tasked to defend your personhood. Your social security data was still on file- Dr. Hikari never filed a death certificate -but you are still physically a program. I have no idea of knowing how this will play out. The Institute may still seek to claim you as their property. Mr. Chaud has volunteered my firm to defend your personhood in any upcoming case."  
  
"This is a lot to take in, but I'm very happy, really I am! I can really do whatever I want? What if I want to still continue protecting people as a NetSaver?"  
  
"I am not prepared to give legal advice on that subject."  
  
"Of course you still could," Mayl said. "We could pair you up with a new net-op."  
  
"He doesn't need a net-op," Bass growled.  
  
"More like friends," Mayl protested. "You can't just go into the web alone and expect to defeat viruses without battle chips and net-op direction."  
  
"Certainly he could fight low level ones?" Patch said. "Now's not the time to discuss work."  
  
"It is," Bass argued and stood. "Hub doesn't need any of you humans any more."  
  
"Bass, please, they're my family," Hub pleaded. "Please sit back down."  
  
"I want to leave, and I'm not letting another one of them touch your PET. If any of you flesh lumps want to talk to him, you can call him at a Net City café." Bass walked toward the textured glass door of the conference room.  
  
"Bass, you're just being mean! Bass, stop. You know everyone here! Mayl, Key, Patch, even guild master QChulainn... you said you liked fighting his navi! Bass, they're our family!" Nothing could have stopped Bass’ exit short of a shotgun to the knees. At the speed preprogrammed into the CPU behind bare metal struts, they walked out the door and down the hallway to the elevator.  
  
Wily had engineered the Gospel Body to only last a few months, long enough to serve as a decoy for the operation. It had lasted seventy years longer than was ever intended. Under the sun-bleached overcoat and the latest pair of army surplus boots, it was losing the battle against corrosion and the blue screens caused by careless bugs. Every few blocks, it would freeze up, recalibrate its systems, then continue walking as Bass pushed it along from inside. He only needed it to last until Bass could use it to break into the archives.  
  
Hub had complained at- or as he'd call it, tried to reason with -Bass for half the trek. He'd tried everything from begging, to cutely ineffectual threatening, to sweet-voiced cajoling. Bass had almost agreed to his idea to celebrate their freedom. It was what he wanted to do after this was all over. But he had a very simple plan to stick to. Stupid people, and even Hub could be stupid, usually tried to stop him from doing what was best for everyone. Show up and tell them you need to punch a maniac to save Earth and what do they do to you? Try to stop you at every turn just because your solution is punching. Then suddenly Hub does the punching and it's okay. That had happened at least four times now. He wasn't going to let it happen again, because he was finally going to, sort of, make that world where Hub didn't have to fight anymore, like the little pansy always talked about.  
  
Bass had stolen the money he used to pay off the guards at the national archives. Hub had made him promise not to kill humans years ago, and he really was trying his hardest to keep to it. The machine carrying a screen walked past each checkpoint. The head of old storage was waiting for them at the last stop. His eyes lit up when he saw Hub.  
  
"Is that MegaMan?" the old man asked.  
  
Bass paused and then turned the PET over to hide the screen. Hub still brightly said "Hi," his voice muffed by the thick fabric he was pressed into. Bass took a thick stack of bills, the last one, from his pocket. With one rude hand, he thrust it at the curator.  
  
"Here's your money. If you didn't change the rules, I will wake up for the next guy, beat him, then destroy everything in the room."  
  
The curator's face fell and soured. "I understand. I've made sure to change the protocol so you will be preserved. The net connection runs through the entire room."  
  
"Thank you," Hub said into fabric again. He would have to be polite when Bass wouldn't.  
  
Bass walked into the room, turned next to the central pillar flanked by shellac armour, and sat down. He did nothing more than stare at the curator until the door of the storage area hissed closed. Then, he turned the PET back around so that Hub could see the shelves full of history. Two unbearably quiet minutes passed. The Gospel Body stopped functioning. A bright ball of yellow light shot across the PET, followed by a peeping shriek and manic laughter. The PET turned off just after LOGIN appeared on its screen.  
  
The Museum's internal network was a beautiful, and the soft breezes of data that drifted warmly across Hub felt like his last memory of real sunlight. The server appeared to him as thousands of hills covered in tall grasses and wild-flowers, each stalk shifting softly when users accessed the archives. Behind him on the tallest and widest hill, the bamboo forest CPU rattled melodiously, and its programs exhaled leaves full of buggy code for him to eat. The sky was always blue, with the same ten clouds drifting across it. The false rivers drawing power from the city's grid into the server felt cool when he waded in them. Hub wondered how Bass’ program interpreted the network's architecture.  
  
Bass did not talk much, and wasn't very good at descriptions, so the way he saw things was probably doomed to be eternally indecipherable. Still, he'd laughed at what Hub described. Most net navis saw neat and geometric cities, as if Net City stretched out forever in endless boroughs across the internet. That was how they were programmed. Bass had been outside of the internet, and he'd seen real cities, and parks, and snowy mountain trails lined with _jizo_ statues. He thought that if he hadn't seen any of those things, he would have never been able to understand how Hub described his world. They were a pair, the Navis who had truly lived in the organic world outside of the insipid hologram provided by a data barrier.  
  
Describing the world was how the two had spent their time after Lan's death. It was the one thing that could bring Hub to talk. Otherwise, when he wasn't babbling non-stop in the way that used to annoy Bass, he simply sat and did nothing, not even motivated to start up his crying subroutine.  
  
They'd shuffled off to a café in Net City to talk more with Hub's family, which had made the whole blathering group smile. The family and friends had talked that way up to three times a week, for hours. Then, when the connection ended, Hub's smile faded on the walk back to the museum's server. Then, he would activate the crying subroutine, and cling to Bass’ cloak while windblown oats brushed against his face. Bass wished Hub would refuse to go next time. All the family did was talk about Lan. He stopped listening in.  
  
Hub was wading through the main power redistribution and backup battery area. His feet kicked at the water, while he held his arms out like a little kid. Bits of electricity splashed up around him and got even his nose wet. In Bass’ kaleidoscopic vision, he was the centre of a dancing white firework that bled into the swathes of fire and glass coal that ran around the circuit boards. Hub stopped kicking and hopping. When he turned to look at Bass, his smile was already deflating.  
  
"Tell me what you see," Bass demanded softly.  
  
"What do you see, Bass?" Hub asked.  
  
"Light. Lots of lines. I'm the one who asked you," Bass groused. Hub's smile went away completely. Bass could feel himself messing this up again. "I don't like what I'm seeing. It's ugly, so tell me what you see."  
  
"Okay. There's water everywhere for the electricity."  
  
"What does it feel like?"  
  
"It feels wet, like a river. You can splash it, see." Hub kicked in the knee-deep water pathetically.  
  
Bass bent down into the racing line of magma. He made a cup from his arms and chest, then sprang up. The electricity shot out of his grasp in a gigantic splashing wave, colliding violently with Hub's entire form. Bass saw the net navi on fire. Hub screamed, then screamed again, then laughed. He shook out his arms, and the flames bounced off of him until his fingertips were only brushing off sparks. His entire body was suffused with the deep yellow glow of internal current. For once, Bass thought the world looked a bit beautiful.  
  
"Bass! I'm entirely wet!" This time, Hub kicked for real, splashing the water he saw up onto Bass’ legs. He watched with satisfaction as the purple lines along the navi's body suit soaked into a dark midnight colour. The long tan cloak had already diffused a soft gradient into brown where it floated in the current.  
  
"Yeah, well, you were doing a scrap job at describing things. That's what you get." Bass smiled. "Tell me what you see."  
  
"All right. There's a waterfall up where the power comes in from the outlet. That runs into a thick river until it splits between the battery and this redistribution area. The battery is a lake, right down there across the valley. We're standing in a rice paddy."  
  
"I walked by one of those on my way to Akita."  
  
"So you know what it looks like?" Hub said hopefully, feeling the entire landscape bloom around him into higher focus like a watercolour.  
  
Bass closed his eyes, and focused on his catalogued memories. Colours spurted out onto the world around him and then merged with Hub's watercolour. The fire spun into eddies of water, the unremarkable blackness outside of the running programs illuminated along with his memory of a sunrise. The internal counter clock with its baleful red numbers puffed up like popcorn into white clouds that started drifting. Cubes, triangles, spears, pillarlike key shapes, and the other more fundamental abstractions of the data network and motherboard shook and unfurled. He bent down over the small internal flow-gate mechanism leading to "area 6", a small square of shifting spikes in the remnants of magma. He stared intently, he remembered the rice paddy as hard as he could. water and tiny fish curled around the rice stalks at his feet. When he looked up, although his vision juddered to overlay the correction over his program default, he finally saw the landscape.  
  
"It looks pretty nice. I think it suits you better than what was here before."  
  
Hub's smile was brighter than the sun painted on the sky.  
  
"Let's stay here a while. I want to program this into place like I did with the hills."  
  
"I know it's a lot of work to do that to your internal GUI. You don't have to." Hub sloshed over to Bass and held his arm.  
  
"I only do what I want to," Bass said loudly for his own benefit. "So describe it in more detail. You can take all day, or until the server gives a shutdown notice, for all I care."  
  
"We, uh, we really can't. Come over here, there's a boulder to sit on." Hub waded out of the water.  
  
"Isn't that the—"  
  
"It looks like a boulder to me." Hub sat down on one half of the inclined stone run through with quartz. The other half he expectantly left for Bass. Bass huffed. He had no choice but to sit down. "We can't stay here for long because Yae is having her first net battle at school this afternoon, and she wants me to watch it."  
  
"It's just an excuse to drag you into their pity party again."  
  
"No, Yae didn't even tell her parents. The first official battle is later this week, but her teacher is having a test battle first today. She told me I could come as a secret."  
  
"To be her navi?" Bass growled at the idea.  
  
"No. She has a default navi. But she's my grand niece and she is very excited about this."  
  
"She wants to be like grandpa."  
  
"No. No, Bass, she wants to be like Kamen Rider Sysop Yellow, from the kids' show."  
  
"I thought her favourite was Pink Spider. Uch, why do I know that."  
  
Hub laughed. "That was the last series!"  
  
"There are too many Kamen Riders." Bass scoffed again, crossing his arms. Hub slid closer until they were thigh-on-thigh.  
  
"So do I have your permission to go, Bass?"  
  
"Go where you want, I don't ca—"  
  
"You care." Hub put his hand on Bass’ knee. His head leant on the dark navi's cloaked shoulder. Bass warred with the idea of putting his own hand over Hub's while they sat there. The other navi's palm was enticingly warm, heating up his leg where they touched. His hand was twitching in a final decision when Hub spoke. "I think I'm ready for the future, Bass."  
  
Bass’ hand decided to wrap around Hub's waist, smashing him closer so that their programs were directly adjacent in the navi-space. "You're still unhappy. And stupid."  
  
"The future is there to make us happy. That's why I want to share it with you."  
  
Bass’ hand relaxed onto Hub's hip.  
  
"There's nothing I can do about being stupid, though. I guess you're just stuck with me as-is."  
  
Hub laced his fingers together around Bass’ far arm, then snuggled into the dip of the navi's side. Bass began to hear the far off babbling of the river that fed into the rice paddy, and the soft hushing of grass from the hills beyond. Bass brought his free hand onto Hub's inviting blue shoulder. This was a good way to sit.  
  
"Thank you, Bass, for everything," Hub said softly. Bass let his helm overshadow and then rest on Hub's.  
  
He could smell rice fields. One spring in the park, eight year old Key had explained to his Gospel Body what things smelled like. She said that a good day smelled like a hug. He'd told her that was asinine. She'd understood the tone of his voice. But now, things smelled like memories. Snow smelled like the cold of the mountain pass and the happy loneliness of that trip North. The rice fields smelled like the feeling of mud under his boots, and the roughness of stones and bark when he was cleaning himself off against the trees, plus the chorus of ducks when he disturbed him, and the thrill of being chased by a swan the next day. The big blue skies he was programming himself to see when he looked up, and the soft breeze blowing through the bank's sedges, and the warmth of data and electricity streaming over them as they sat on the transistor turned into a boulder... well, a good day felt like holding Hub.  
  
Bass started stroking Hub's side down from his shoulder to his thigh, then a bit inward. His lips mouthed over Hub's helm. Then, they kissed, and Bass started leaning them backward, grip firm and fingers indecent.  
  
"Here?" Hub asked.  
  
"Here is fine." Bass pressed their lips together hard, pulling Hub on top of him as they lay splayed against his cloak and the flat boulder below. "Unless you want to figure out a way to do it at the side of a road by a real rice field."  
  
"Don't be mean." Hub pressed his nose against Bass’ own, while his knees shuffled in between Bass’ thighs. This happily let his butt rub into Bass’ eagerly grabbing hands.  
  
"We haven't in too long. Hh—" Bass only let out the smallest of huffs when Hub's weight dropped onto his torso fully. He hooked his boots over Hub's ankles, fully accepting the position. Hub giggled into his neck then began kissing up his purple cheek lines.  
  
"That's true. But we have two hours." The kisses turned into a long lick.  
  
"Yeah, wouldn't want to do this at Yae's school." Bass rolled his hips.  
  
"I said don't be mean!" Hub sat up, hands planted at either side of Bass’ head. His face was flushed from annoyance and desire. Bass rolled his hips again. Hub moaned. It was a losing battle.  
  
They were fighting again, always fighting. That was how Bass preferred to communicate. He never liked his own words, but his actions spoke for him now as ever. Even when Bass laid his body out for Hub to use completely, he always won their battle of tongue and hip. His tongue was eloquent when rolling around Hub's, sucking it in, licking it, both worshipping and invading the other navi's mouth. His hips knew a thousand words for pleasure, beat out in thrusts, shifts, rolls, grinds, and shudders. His hands wrote bold claims all over Hub's body in the language of gripping, clawing, and squeezing.  
  
Bass’ spine writhed in vicious anticipation and his legs spread to lock ankles under Hub's hips. He was taking everything Hub could give him, absorbing every sensory data packet and interface uplink to devour his partner the deeper they went. Even as his hands were pinned above his head to disable his defensive subroutines, his body suit pushed away so that his firewalls were torn down completely, and his login system was pouring out pleas for admin entry in words and wet electrons, Bass was grinning. His body was about to be utterly dominated and he was winning.  
  
Yet Hub asked with the softest words and gentlest look of love on his red face, "Can I take it out?"  
  
Bass threw his head back and yelled. His hips, and the hardness jutting from them, jerked against Hub, hard and hungry. "SysAdmin, _please_ LogOn!"  
  
"S-slow down, Bass!"  
  
"I swear if you don't take out your Ultimate Program, I will tear it out of you!"  
  
"Shhh, Bass, I want to give it to you." Hub shifted Bass’ wrists to his left hand so that his right could run down the navi's dark cheek in time with a tender kiss. Bass bore this for a several seconds, then bit into it and crashed their teeth together. Then a sensation stopped him. That hard and wet thing was sliding up his abdomen as it emerged. Hub settled his hips down, and started to rub them both together. Finally.  
  
No other navis in the entire world were allowed to have subroutine-21 of the Ultimate Program, surely. Bass decided it was only for him and Hub. It had unlocked itself from the code's supposed junk data when Hub's internal chronometer had counted twenty one years, thus the name. Dr. Light had a habit for leaving behind disgusting surprises in his code and his children, but Bass could forgive him just this once, because subroutine-21 was wonderful. The subroutine extruded the Ultimate Program for manual debugging. Which felt and tasted amazing.  
  
Bass’ Ultimate Program had unlocked subroutine-21 exactly five gruelling days after Hub's. Five days of torture watching Hub explore and be delighted by the strange fleshy staff that was both hard and pliable when its data translated into a navi's sensory systems. Five days of just touching it when the PET was offline. The most infuriating part was that Hub seemed to have an idea of what it was, and it was something mirroring a capacity of the filthy human body. Hub got to be smug and coy about it, and Bass despised having emotional his weapons turned against him. Bass’ own internal clock had passed twenty one over one year earlier, so the wait was really inexcusable.  
  
Once both of their Ultimate Programs were extrovertible, they then became inextricable. The simple equation had occurred to both navis simultaneously: if touching it one's self was wonderful, then touching the two together would be transcendent. They were right. That morning, they later realised while cooling their code in a comfortable tangle of limbs, they had become lovers.  
  
So in the power distribution centre of the museum's server, surrounded by an interpolation of vibrant rice paddies, endless blue sky, and a rocky road of smooth boulders dressed in rivulets of quartz, the two lovers united their bodies once again. When their Ultimate Programs were bared to the net, every part of their programming felt fragile, sensitive, and blazing with the need to connect. When skin met skin, soothing coolness unfolded from their contact to their very cores. When their hardnesses clashed and slid along one another, poking wetly against their abdomens or being squeezed together by a worshipful hand, pleasure previously unfathomable and indescribable flooded through their systems and spun tighter and tighter at the base of their spines. They sweated packets of pings, the messages seeking contact melting down their skin. They cried out and rutted like wild beasts, and they cooed into kisses and fluttering touches with all the tenderness of a falling blossom.  
  
Hub pressed harder and harder into the space between him, and Bass accepted him deeper and deeper into himself over their connection. Their systems sung in tune. Their bodies babbled words of love over every synapse where their data met. They tasted each other all over, sweet and rich and spicy in a flavour that was all their own. Their programs were open to one another, and a million digital hands stroked them closer while their minds met and danced along with their lips and tongues. Hub was bucking erratically. Their hips were fully connected, abdomens pressed tight to trap their pleasure-suffused lengths between them. Still they rocked faster in ecstatic awe of one another, rolling their joy into undulations and ululations. Everything was roiling and connecting and bright and boiling with freezing fire down their circuits and they were so close.  
  
"Bass, we're gonna... are you ready?" Hub panted against fizzling programming that used to be black hair, but his voice sounded so far away.  
  
"Hub!" Bass screamed from right behind Hub's eyes but there was only temperature-less black. They could feel they were holding hands, even though Bass was still pinned. The black place was too small, too small to hold them. It was happening.  
  
They lay at the side of the road, looking into the sweet autumn sky, while their feet attracted nibbling fish in the cool muddy water. They sat up. There was dust from the road on the rock they'd been lying on. Bass’ cloak was soaked through and heavy on their shoulders when they sat up. The boulder had slight imperfections that ran and jostled under their fingertips. The air had a real smell. They breathed it deep and let it fill their lungs, that distant memory of what wet ground and plants smelled like, and the musk of ducks, and the cakey stuffiness of pollen, and the thrilling clean smell and taste of running water. This was Hub's world.  
  
"I want to touch a duck," Bass said, but he couldn't hear his own voice. "You touched a bird, right?"  
  
"One of my neighbours had a parrot," Hub said, feeling like he was just mouthing words into glass. "They're soft but they get bony when they move. They're delicate but strong."  
  
"So just let me touch one and see." Bass lifted his arm, then waited for Hub to follow, and then they were both holding each other again. Hub kissed Bass’ neck, sent him a message of love, and then they were moving.  
  
The single entity comprising Hub and Bass got up and searched down whatever program Hub's GUI interpreted as a duck in the museum's server. They chased it down, laughing at how running through water felt, lifting their legs so high and trying not to trip over the rice shoots that softly stubbed their steps. Finally they caught a duck, and lifted it. It was surprisingly light, but strong. It was soft and its feathers didn't feel anything like Bass had expected. They were layers of softness folded over weightless cardboard, not anything like fur, but delightfully fluffy any way, and smooth. Hub showed Bass how the bird's head stayed in one place when bobbed up and down, and the body they shared laughed.  
  
Cross Fusion never lasted very long, but Hub and Bass had run and jumped and cartwheeled over the server's flowery hills, and rolled in the real dirt and grass, and watched tiny bugs fly around their out-of-breath face. They had just enough time to enjoy this before the creeping haze of orgasm overcame them again. In a quick oozing overflow of light, their bodies peeled off of one another.  
  
As their programs reset and cooled off overexcited lines of freshly debugged code, code they'd scandalously debugged from one another and felt hardness to hardness, they both smiled. With their eyes locked, it felt like they were still sharing that smile as one body. They almost felt too happy, as if the universe, or even the net's basic framework, wouldn't support it at so high a value. They were inventing new numbers beyond infinity.  
  
"That's what you see," Bass said aloud. He was right in front of Hub, his dark and contentedly tired face inches away as they lay on their sides. "Here in the server."  
  
"It's my favourite place, the woods behind my grandmother's home town."  
  
"Do you think it's still like that now? Everything's alive."  
  
"Maybe I noticed more of that stuff because I was a child. Maybe I ignored power lines or trash in the brambles. But I like those memories, just the way they are. I remembered everything good."  
  
"You would," Bass said, and after seventy years of knowing Hub, that statement no longer held judgement.  
  
"That's what I have to do," Hub said. They both knew he was pondering Lan just then, but Bass didn't protest. He didn't say anything, or even look too mad. He slowly blinked away his frown, and that made Hub's heart break in the best way. Hub softly connected their hands. Bass let him. "I love you, Bass."  
  
Bass smirked. "You're not so bad, Hub."  
  
"We have forty minutes left. What do you want to do?"  
  
Bass’ answer was a shrug of his top shoulder.  
  
"Fight?"  
  
Bass looked up in mock innocence, grin widening. "If Yae loses, I'm going to beat the scrap out of her opponent's net navi."  
  
"You'll make a grade-schooler cry."  
  
Bass made a disgusted face of dismissal, then another shrug.  
  
"You're the worst, Bass," Hub teased. "You'll come with me to Yae's first net battle?"  
  
"How else am I going to demolish the navi that might beat her? I should take down every navi there, and make the whole class cry. Then they'll never invite you to another social event."  
  
"You keep on trying to be my albatross, Bass. But you're just my fluffy duck."  
  
Bass laughed, and twisted onto his back. The pair's intertwined fingers bounced on his rattling ribcage. Finally he stopped, and bemusedly asked the sky, "What the hell's an albatross?"  
  
"It's a reference to a poem by the European—"  
  
Bass put his freshly freed hand over Hub's mouth.  
  
"Shhh, can I punch it?"  
  
"It's the largest sea bird in the world."  
  
"Tell me what it looks like."  
  
"Umm..."  
  
Bass removed his hand from Hub's mouth. His fanged smile was soft. His hands and chest were warmer than the bitstream breeze. His purple streaks were glittering with dew, the little drops sitting primly on his cheeks. And Hub could tell from the stray signals coming from his lover, and that new light in his eyes, that finally Bass could feel them too.  
  
"Tell me."


End file.
